James Graham: ‘TV hasn’t cracked class yet. Britain’s too queasy about it’
England’s lacklustre start to Euro 2024 worried James Graham more than most of his fellow countrymen. The Dear England writer was in Germany following Gareth Southgate’s squad, preparing to update his play (and make a TV series) about how the Three Lions manager had transformed the mood around the national team for the better.
Then, after a stodgy 0-0 draw with Slovenia in Cologne, travelling fans booed Southgate and threw plastic beer cups in his direction. It appeared that, after eight years of progress, it was going to end in acrimony. “Even though I didn’t love the football, I started to get really nervous about the narrative, how that was turning against Gareth,” says Graham. “I thought, ‘Gosh, does a play about Gareth suddenly sound really naive?’ ”
Graham, 42, was in the stadium for England’s other group games, when the team limped to a win against Serbia and toiled in a 1-1 draw versus Denmark, so he saw the febrile mood up close. “One of the things that stops these guys playing well is when they feel fear and pressure and nerves, and some of that comes from expectations. The first time we were favourites to win the f---ing thing, that does something. And if you know that you’re gonna get booed off the pitch if you don’t do well, or if you know that you’re gonna open your social media and people are gonna be saying those things, it affects you. You could see it.
“It was very disappointing to see that we had forgotten that we have a role to play, and we were damaging the thing that we loved.”
Southgate and his charges, of course, managed to turn things around and slogged their way to the final thanks to stoppage time equalisers, a penalty shootout and a last-minute winner. Defeat to Spain in the Berlin final, and Southgate’s decision to resign two days later, at least gives Graham an ending for Dear England. On one level, Graham says that he is relieved that Southgate no longer has the burden of the “impossible job” on his shoulders, but is gutted that his side lost a second major tournament final by the barest of margins. “I’m happy that the pressure’s off him,” he says. “I just really, really, really, really wanted him to win: to be the guy.”
If England finally banish the decades of hurt since 1966, Graham insists that Southgate – played on stage and in the forthcoming BBC TV version by an uncanny Joseph Fiennes – will be owed a lot of credit as the man who laid the groundwork. “We are gonna win: we are gonna win in the next two tournaments,” Graham promises. “S---! I just f---ing cursed it.”
The boyish Graham, dressed in a short-sleeved Hollister shirt and chinos, has many other things to discuss when we meet at his publicist’s office. First, he delivers the prestigious MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival on August 21, followed this weekend by a second series of Sherwood, the gritty drama set in Graham’s native Nottinghamshire, back two years after the original was hailed as one of the best TV dramas in recent years.
The first series felt personal for Graham, who was born in Mansfield and went to school in Ashfield, as it was inspired by the lingering tensions of the miners’ strike and two grisly murders in 2004. One of the threads running throughout the new series is whether a new coal mine should be given permission to open, decades after the death knell sounded for Nottinghamshire’s collieries. If Graham had the choice, would he open a new mine there? “It’s hard, isn’t it? There’s absolutely no way that I would want to deny anybody work and investment. However, I do wonder if it’s the wrong solution to the right question,” he says. “I’m not sure that after the long amount of trauma and pain that that caused, just resetting that is necessarily healthy. But I would look to see investment and jobs in the East Midlands, and a really imaginative conversation about what that could be, rather than just going back to what it was.”
Graham is one of our most thoughtful writers and he is troubled by the riots at the start of the month, especially the “Elon Musk-iness” of it all and how misinformation in social media silos led to real-life unrest. “We feel like less of a cohesive nation, because we are split into these groups. We don’t watch the same things, we don’t get the news from the same place anymore,” he says. “We’re not all part of one single story, there’s several going on at the same time and when they clash, they clash. So I don’t know how you ever solve that. Whenever you try to explain it, you sound like you’re trying to justify it, don’t you? And none of us are doing that, but I’m slightly obsessed, in a Sherwood way, with the collapse of physical community and the public realm: libraries, clubs but also, f---ing hell, in some cases it’s pubs.”
The new Labour government has its work cut out healing the fissures and, especially, improving the lot of white working-class communities. “When people talk about levelling up, it’s all about tram lines, and I think they’re building an observatory in Ashfield,” says Graham. “The root cause is people want to be a real community again, and not just be online. Until you fix that, I think you’re not even going to get to the heart of what is going on in Britain at the moment.”
Also in Ashfield is Lee Anderson, the first MP who defected to Reform UK and was returned in July’s general election. Was he surprised that Anderson, formerly a Labour councillor and Conservative deputy chairman, won despite Keir Starmer’s landslide? “Not really, because he managed to find himself a national profile,” he says. “Look, any town is not one homogeneous opinion, is it? I know people who really dislike him and feel like he’s presenting a kind of working-class trope that is reductive in terms of the bluntness of his social views, and then I know some rated him as a local MP. So, what can you do?” Ashfield previously bucked national trends in 2017, when there was a large swing to the Tories despite the Jeremy Corbyn surge.
Class is one of Graham’s great preoccupations, as shown by The Way, which got a mixed reception after it premiered on BBC One in February, and his stage adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff. In his Edinburgh speech, he will explore TV’s problem with the working class and how drama, like Mr Bates vs the Post Office, can shape the political agenda. “In loads of areas of representation, there’s been great leaps and bounds, and rightly so, but when it comes to regionality, when it comes to class, we haven’t quite cracked it yet. I think that’s partly because we find it a bit queasy for some reason talking about class in this country,” he says.
TV has a duty to tell stories about these communities but there are fewer writers and actors with those backgrounds making it today, Graham argues. “When I think back to the TV dramas that inspired me growing up, they were everywhere. Blackstuff, Cracker, Band of Gold, Our Friends in the North: maybe because we had a strong regional studio system back then,” he says.
Graham insists he was not bruised by his experience making The Way, a dystopia set in south Wales co-created with Michael Sheen and Adam Curtis, despite disappointing reviews and audience figures. “You have a responsibility, even if you take some hits, to keep going and keep generating that culture,” he says. “Otherwise, we’re going to end up in the habit of just watching Friends.”
One of the many other things keeping Graham busy is working intensively on the Broadway transfer of Tammy Faye, his Almeida musical about an American televangelist co-written with Elton John and the Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears, with previews starting in October.
The word most often used to describe Graham is “prolific”, but the astonishing volume and quality of his output has taken its toll. Earlier this year he admitted, with great candour, that he had sought help at Workaholics Anonymous when he realised that his compulsive habits were damaging his life. Today, he seems relaxed and content. “I am better, but a bit like other addictions [to drink or drugs], it’s always ready to come back into your life,” he says.
“Sometimes, I notice baffling behaviour: where I will disappear from the world for a while, not really eat, not really sleep, and two days later, go, ‘Oh my God, it’s happening again,’”
Graham adds. “But at least I get the voice that goes, ‘It’s happening again, stop doing it.’ I have lovely people around me who check in. Apart from not having a holiday until November, I am more aware. I do take weekends off sometimes.”
Sherwood starts on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday. The TV adaptation of Dear England will air on BBC One next year, and the play returns to the National Theatre from March 25; nationaltheatre.co.uk
